Summary — Why You Should Choose Northern Maine (and Sewall House) for Your Quiet Vacation
- Start each day in silence with 30 minutes of morning meditation to foster inner calm.
- Unwind with afternoon yoga like Restorative, Yin, and Yoga Nidra to deepen your sense of peace.
- Retreat to a tranquil setting in small-town Maine, surrounded by nature and free from crowds.
- Enjoy privacy—every guest stays in their own private room, no shared dorms.
- Reconnect with nature through quiet kayaking, hiking, and profound wildlife encounters.
- Optional digital detox—we’ll even hold your phone if you want a true tech break.
- Marvel at dark skies and the hush of starlit nights, perfect for perspective and reflection.
In this digitized information age, we can often feel like we are spinning out of control.
Beyond yoga, meditation, or massage — all great things that are offered at Sewall House Yoga Retreat — people are beginning to realize that a vacation experience that emphasizes quiet disconnectedness throughout the time you are away creates more overall benefits.
A “quiet retreat” or “quiet vacation” is different from a “silent retreat”.
A silent retreat, which is usually associated with Vipassana, often centers on sitting for hours a day in silence, not speaking, writing, or reading. During a quiet vacation or quiet retreat at Sewall House, we encourage reading, writing, and conversation.
While silent retreats mostly help train the mind, quiet retreats or quiet vacations offer techniques for the entire being. These techniques include physical (yoga, hiking, swimming, kayaking, bicycling, walking, movement), mental (meditation, breathing exercises, and chanting), emotional (positive interactions with like-minded people and nature) and spiritual (all of the already mentioned techniques, as well as you choosing when you wish to be alone in the privacy of your room, or elsewhere in nature, or with others).
7 reasons to choose Sewall House Yoga Retreat for your Quiet Vacation
Here are seven features of a quiet vacation you can find at Sewall House Yoga Retreat. Each and every one of these can help lead on the lifelong journey toward self-discovery.
1. Every day begins with 30 minutes of meditation
The first activity on Sewall House’s daily schedule is thirty minutes of silence in group meditation in our yoga studio at 7:30am.
When we opened in 1997, guests would often gather on the porch before yoga, chatting and socializing. We realized this heightened social stimulation first thing in the morning would not be as helpful as inviting the guests into silence, to start the day with a feeling of quiet.
People need quiet, even if silence can at first be uncomfortable. Many guests have told me that mediation motivates them to start their day intentionally quiet and add more silence and quiet to their lives when they return home.
2. We offer quieter yoga in the afternoon
Since Sewall House opened its door as a yoga and wellness retreat in 1997, our offerings have evolved. Until 2003 we offered two Kundalini Yoga classes a day.
As our own practices and teaching have evolved, our schedule has changed to offer an active Hatha-based practice in the morning and quieter, more calming practices like Svaroopa®, Restorative, and Yin in the afternoon. We also sprinkle in Yoga Nidra, which allows people also to feel more quiet and relaxed from within.
3. Sewall House is located in a very small town with few people and nature all around us
Although Sewall House is less than a mile off I-95, you’d never know it. We are off the beaten path in northern New England, nestled in the Maine town of Island Falls, which has a population of less than 800 people.
When they think about a visit to Maine, many people only consider Acadia National Park, which is beautiful and a couple hours south of Island Falls. In fact, some of our Sewall House guests make arrangements to visit Acadia before or after their time with us. But while the masses flock to Acadia, we offer our own brand of exquisite Maine nature unencumbered by crowds.
Our sleepy, little town of Island Falls is a quiet, undiscovered place. It often feels like a step back in time. Residents smile and wave at each other and take time to make friendly smalltalk. When we go out on a hike or kayaking on a lake, our guests often ask, “Where are all the people?”
(But while we are far from the crowds, you can easily reach us by flying into Bangor airport, where we pick can you up, or you can rent a car. Easy!)
4. Every room at Sewall House is a Private Room
While some (most?) other yoga retreats offer only roommate or even dorm housing situations, every guest at Sewall House enjoys a private room for themselves, or themselves and the guest they bring with them.
5. You can find clarity in the silence of nature at Sewall House
Any chance to be in nature’s quietude is an opportunity to learn how to be in the moment. And often those moments bring clarity.
Sewall House guests like to slip down to the lake to kayak at sunrise. They simply float on the water, perhaps watching a bald eagle as it soars overhead or listening to the cry of nearby loons. Some guests enjoy a morning stroll or jog around town, or a walk through the pine forest that’s right in Island Falls. These are a few of the ways to experience the quiet of small-town America as opposed to the hustle bustle of our cities.
Last summer I had two memorable experiences in the quiet of nature.
The first one happened when I awoke at our rustic — and completely disconnected from wifi or cell service — cabin.
I woke around 6:00am. As I roused from my sleeping spot on the second floor I looked outside at the new day, I saw a large, dark object moving up and down in the water, like something from a sci-fi movie. The object became larger in my view, and I saw that it was slowly moving toward the shore in front of my cabin. I left my dog in the cabin and walked the short path to the shore.
As I approached the object, now on shore, it immediately went back into the water. I finally realized it was a huge bald eagle, and now it was sitting on the water the way a loon or duck does! Just sitting. How could I help the poor creature? It thrashed about a bit more, then dipped again below the water. Did it have a broken wing?
I remembered that I had to take my dog out for his morning business. So, still wondering how I could help the eagle, I went back to the cabin, leashed my dog, and walked him away from where the eagle was. When he was finished, I dropped him off back at the cabin, and returned to the shore.
I scanned the area and saw that this amazing bald eagle was now sitting on a high rock away from the shore in its full, glorious stance. To my further amazement, as I watched it, the eagle took off, and with its huge wingspan flew low over the water and disappeared.
I cannot begin to explain the emotion that went through me after this experience. It reminded me that we may think someone, including ourselves, is damaged. But, as the eagle showed me so determinedly, we are stronger than we think, when we really want to keep going.
I was recently inspired a second time — much less dramatically, but just as emphatically — as I again gazed out upon the quiet of the lake.
I saw a butterfly with a broken wing on the outer windowsill at the cabin. My heart wept for that broken wing. Then, as I continued to look at that butterfly, they flew away, and I was reminded that even though we may be damaged, we can still fly.
Come to Sewall House to find clarity in nature.
(By the way, I talked to a local man about my eagle encounter soon after it happened. I asked him whether he’d ever seen a bald eagle swim with one wing. “Why sure,” he said in the local slow, no-need-to-rush drawl. “We often throw fish that we don’t want — like pickerel — out to the eagles just to see them swim, which they do when a fish is too heavy for them to fly with.” I thought back, and sure enough, when I had gone down to my boat to take myself and my dog back to town, there had been a very big fish about two-thirds eaten right on a rock by my boat!)
6. If you want us to, we’ll hold onto your phone for you
Digital detox can be an important part of a quiet vacation.
You can choose to self-limit your phone time, but if you want to let us help, you can hand your phone over to us for safe-keeping.
While we do offer free wi-fi at Sewall House, we encourage our guests to be “untethered”. Turning off your phone offers uninterrupted opportunity for you to read, write, journal, reflect, sit, or to just be in your room. You can also choose to be out in nature alone, or find activities to do with others where everyone can truly connect, undistracted by electronic devices. Don’t forget, too, that you can take that quiet into the sauna or our one-person hot tub with you, instead of taking your phone.
Recharge your brain instead of your device!
7. You can take advantage of our dark skies
Northern Maine has some of the darkest skies in the United States and our nights are extremely quiet.
You can find even more quiet by planning a night at one of our our local wilderness parks, Baxter State Park or Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. You might consider an overnight at our rustic cabin (ask us about that). You may simply walk a little way out of town to get beyond the few street lights on the main drag.
Feeling how tiny we are in the cosmos and how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things can put our lives in perspective, undistracted by outside noises except those that nature reveals at night.
Oh, and our full moons are amazing!
Conclusion
At Sewall House you can choose to be as quiet or silent as you wish. If you need guidance to achieve the goals of your silent vaction, we can help you. Your time at Sewall House Yoga Retreat is built around your freedom to create your own schedule. Within that freedom you have the ability to enjoy quiet, meaningful conversations with our staff and guests, where you may discover that our individual challenges are similar. And don’t forget, too, that the massages and healing sessions (like Reiki) we offer are also opportunities to be silent, while receiving nurturing and healing.
SEWALL HOUSE has been offering small personalized retreats with six private bedrooms since 1997 and continues to evolve in our offerings and expertise. Created on the principle “Simplicity in a Complex World” Sewall House Yoga Retreat continues to offer ways to simplify your life, find more clarity, learn or renew healthy lifestyle habits, and be healed and nurtured by our amazing team. We do this all within the walls of the house where a young Theodore Roosevelt received much the same from the Sewall Family in the 1800s.
Book your personal quiet retreat with Sewall House now. Our 2025 reservations start on May 24, 2025.
